-First
Person: By Any Other Name
-Columns: Daisy Hernandez, Patricia Smith and Gloria
Steinem

The
generation of feminists that the media called strident,
hysterical, and hairy-legged--we were very angry. We
had to be. This generation is coming along to an altered
landscape, and it was our stridency (although the media
was wrong--we had a great time) that altered the landscape.
They will have different issues to fight for. And we'll
be there for them.

The
notion that we were and are a white movement is wrong,
but it may come from the fact that The Feminine Mystique
was a motivator for the second wave, and it resonated
for white suburban women. But by the time we got to
the National Women's Conference in 1977, delegates from
conservative states were arguing that if we wanted to
pass the ERA (we only had three states to go), we couldn't
burden the movement with "other issues," like race and
class and sexual identity. The conference adopted all
17 of our issues. It was all of us or none of us. Race
and class and sexuality were not other issues--they
were the issues.

The
problems feminism has tackled have everything to do with
women of color as well as white women: day care, domestic
violence, pay equity. But if they're articulated by a
white spokesperson, do women of color see their experience
identified? No. There are spokeswomen of color, but the
media doesn't focus on them. Especially in the early days,
it was a white male media and they were covering feminism
and thinking, could this be my wife? In Fort Wayne, Indiana,
where I was first involved in feminism, the matrons of
the city jails were making half of what the male janitors
were making. They were largely African American, but divided
by gender. We never said we're only interested in raising
white women's paychecks. Whether you call yourself a feminist
doesn't matter to me, but I think it's important that
women of color who believe in these values identify themselves
as feminists so their peers can see that the movement
is about all of us.